ArcMap, a part of the ArcGIS geographic-information system software from the Environmental Systems Research Institute, can be used in conjunction with Microsoft Excel. If you want to use some or all of the data contained in an Excel spreadsheet with ArcMap, in you must insert the Excel file into the ArcMap project. You can even choose to insert just some of the sheets from your Excel workbook. Excel 2010 spreadsheets can contain almost anything from plain text and tables to coordinates. You can transfer tables, coordinates and statistics easily from Excel to ArcMap.

Launch ArcMap on your computer.

Click the "Add Data" button at the top of the ArcMap window to start inserting the Excel document.

Select "Datasets and Layers" in the resulting file browser's "Show of Type" drop-down box to ensure the Excel file is displayed.

Use the file browser to locate and select the Excel file.

Click "Add" and the file browser displays the sheets in your Excel file, if it contains more than one.

Select one of the sheets or hold the "Ctrl" key and click to select multiple sheets.

Click the "Add" button again to add the Excel sheets to the Table of Contents.

Tips

Ensure your Excel field names start with a letter; numbers and special characters can cause errors.

You should only include only letters, numbers and underscores in the Excel field names; any other special character can cause errors.

Keep the Excel field names shorter than 64 characters.

Ensure all Excel cells that hold numeric data are set to Numeric type; otherwise ArcMap will convert them to text.

Warnings

ArcMap can only read the first 255 characters of a cell before converting it to a BLOB (unreadable).